Well, not me, though God knows I’ve tried. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been gnawing away at Playboy Cover to Cover: the Fifties, an indispensable compendium of Playboy’s first bloom. Yet in the old days, people really did read Playboy—not for the articles, but for the fiction. For Hef and the gang, fiction was the heart and soul of a magazine. It was fiction that turned first-time readers into subscribers. Some people liked to read about jazz, some about sports cars, and some about fashion, but everybody liked to read fiction.
The Fifties was the end of the golden age of the commercial short story, when mass-market magazines published thousands of them every year—everything from “Frannie and Zooey” to “Weasels Ripped My Flesh.” With movies, radio, and television all in the grip of “family entertainment,” fiction was about the only way the average Joe could encounter an imaginative rendering of something resembling “real life.”
Reading these stories today, or at least trying to, one is immediately struck by the conviction that these authors were paid by the word. Readers just didn’t seem to mind long, long stories—10,000 words or more—filled with irrelevant characters, detail, and dialogue, just as long as there was some sort of twist at the end, some sort of punch or payoff—equal parts Hemingway and O. Henry.
It’s all gone today, of course. The short story is rapidly becoming as much of a hot house plant as poetry, with more writers than readers. The glamorous writing jobs for the 21st century are all on HBO. But, sadly, you don’t get your name over the title, and that’s what counts.
Afterwords
Of course, there was plenty to read in Playboy besides the fiction. In remarkably short order, Hef compiled a stable of anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive urban males willing to natter almost without end on the important things in life—Shantung silk draperies, custom-tailored evening wear, binaural hi-fi (what some folks were calling “stereo”), sherried lobster omelets, the perfect martini, and of course sports cars (you needed at least five—at least five!—to get around town properly). Consciously or unconsciously, Hef put together an adolescent version of the “Wish Book”—the Sears Christmas Catalog—all those wonderful toys Santa might bring you, someday.
But what about the Playmates? The Playmates are great. Playboy Cover to Cover: the Fifties is a product of something called Bondi Publications. Whoever they are, they’ve done an excellent job of scanning the original artwork, so that the girls are unmarred by staples or creases—forever young. A few techies have raised questions (read about them here), but count me as one satisfied customer.* Hey, Hef! Bring on the Sixties!
*Playboy is charging a Hefnerian $100 for the DVD, but you can get it for less than half that if you look around.
